


Transubstantiate

by anomieow



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Angst, Blood, Cannibalism, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Hand Feeding, Knifeplay, M/M, Mutineer Camp, Religious Imagery, Rough Sex, ambiguous ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-25
Updated: 2020-11-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:15:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27613346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anomieow/pseuds/anomieow
Summary: “Talk again and I’ll slit your throat,” Hickey replies pleasantly. That shuts Des Voeux up: there was a time it wouldn’t have, but these days one can’t be sure what Hickey will do.
Relationships: Charles Frederick Des Voeux/Cornelius Hickey, William Gibson/Cornelius Hickey
Comments: 10
Kudos: 11
Collections: Hickeyshipping 2020





	Transubstantiate

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tuunbaq](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tuunbaq/gifts).



“I could kill you right now,” Des Voeux had told him once, curling his fingers into a fist in Hickey’s hair and levering his head back. With his other fist he was jerking spasmodically at the diminutive length of his prick. 

“I doubt it,” the kneeling man replied with a crooked smile. 

In Des Voeux Hickey had recognized a spirit similar to his own. Same shape, maybe, a slender little knife of a spirit, weighted in the handle and gleaming, but Des Voeux’s life had been too soft for him to learn to wield himself. So he thought about nasty little things and spoke nasty little words but there was none of that hunger in him that had stropped Hickey to a killing sharpness.

“Truly,” Des Voeux laughed, “I could slit your throat right now.” 

Hickey tilted his head as though inquiringly. Then quick and silent he drew his butterfly knife out of his boot and wheeled it open so its edge just tapped the warm sag of Des Voeux’s stones.

But Des Voeux didn’t yelp like Hickey expected, didn’t try to run. He only reached down to run his finger along the blade. “Jesus,” he breathed, and with a low little moan he liberally anointed Hickey’s brow. 

Perhaps Des Voeux would have been a better fit than Billy: birds of a feather and all that, a pair of little hawks. But there’s no accounting for tastes: Des Voeux was ugly to him, with his chapped cheeks and eyes too widely set, mouth too small. Bony little body. He looked funny naked, like a newborn bird. And anyway, Des Voeux was smitten with the tall, terse doctor, the one with eyes as chill as glass in a face hewn of granite. A mineral man. Perhaps it was his scalpel Des Voeux imagined at his throat when Hickey took him from behind. 

At any rate, Des Voeux—and any other prospect—vanished for Hickey once he became acquainted with Billy. He liked the way Billy seemed soft at first, fragile in his towering, papery thinness, but he was a sharp conversationalist with an inscrutable heart. Yet he had a light in his breast Hickey did not, a little guttering flame, and he let Hickey warm his hands by it. Now and then Hickey could imagine a life beyond ships and darkness and Billy was in it. He hated this in himself but recognized the truth of it as a matter of practicality. Billy had a patient and subdued buoyancy about him: if Des Voeux was a dull knife and Hickey a sharp one, Billy was something else entirely: a cloud, diffuse and adrift, allied with the sun. 

But all of that feels like a different lifetime now. He can recall in his mind’s eye all that came between then and now and wishes he’d thought to scoop Irving’s heart from his chest. He tilts his head, smiling to himself, and pats his thigh. Des Voeux crawls over to him and kneels. The wind shudders and billows the walls of the tent and he feels it in his teeth. It occurs to him, not without resentment, that Des Voeux had probably never known cold like this before, never known this hunger so profound that it transcends and eviscerates simultaneously. Hickey did. Such privations were familiar companions from way back. “Are you still hungry?” He asks Des Voeux quietly.

Des Voeux nods eagerly. He’s a dead man already, his beating heart a mere technicality. Practically speaking, that makes what Hickey’s about to do a waste of perfectly good sustenance. But from the folds of his outsized coat he produces a little hunk of meat, carved from Billy’s thigh. Choice portion. “What would you do for this?” He asks, extending it to Des Voeux and wheeling open his butterfly knife with his other hand. 

“Anything,” Des Voeux confesses in a thin voice.

Hickey extends the meat to him and he takes it between his teeth, lifting his lips from his teeth as he tears a mouthful off with his canine and incisor. His eyes flutter shut in ecstasy as he chews, as though he were tasting it with his prick. Cooled blood on his lips, like rust water. Then he licks and sucks each of Hickeys fingers in turn, his mouth like a little furnace. Gleaning the last sapor of blood and grease as he works each digit like a cock in miniature. An invitation glints in his dark eyes, something daring and alive, even if the rest of the man is hollowed out and dull. Hickey is surprised to feel himself thickening in his loose trousers.

“Hands and knees, if you would, Mr. Des Voeux,” he orders softly.

Des Voeux complies. His movements are wooden, pained. Is it inside him now? His joints pulverized, scars opening like the wicked doppelgängers of flowers? Hickey yanks Des Voeux’s pants to his knees, draws his own hard prick out, spits in his palm. Rests his knife, duller now, against Des Voeux’s throat. “I could kill you right now,” he says. 

Des Voeux just laughs. 

He tries to think of Billy as he jabs two fingers into Des Voeux, eliciting a weak but pained cry. He thinks of the long, elegant lines of Billy’s body, his limbs gleaming in the dark like a crane’s bones—the vague scent of violet water sometimes—but he’s not a man of imagination. He deals in practicalities, tangibilities. Yet now he tears another hunk of meat—of Billy—with his teeth and sticks it into Des Voeux’s mouth.

“What do you say?” He chides.

“Thank you,” Des Voeux says, his words muffled by the mouthful of raw meat.

“Good,” Hickey says. “And hold very still.” He taps his blade against Des Voeux’s jugular. “Or we’ll be thickening our tea with your blood. One more bite?”

Des Voeux cranes his neck over his shoulder, his tongue out, and Hickey gently sets this morsel of meat on there like a communion wafer. He closes his eyes to show how he savors it. When he swallows Hickey can feel his throat knit against the blade and rewards him by pressing his crooked fingers in and up to graze that nervy heart hidden up inside a man. Des Voeux whimpers and bucks violently against him. A brat, he is, and unfinished as a man—no worse, one supposes, than oneself, examined at a distance. 

As Hickey readies Des Voeux’s body—rough and dry, so he remembers his place—he recalls the time he spent in the orphanage. Nuns dressed like drab waterfowl tried to teach him about transubstantiation: how Christ simultaneously inhabited and did not inhabit the bread and wine they were given, the wine adulterated to tart pink water. His essence but not his flesh. But does it work the other way around? Can you resurrect the essence through the flesh? In his pocket he fingers the last morsel he has of Billy. Browning, lint-flecked. A weird, worn warmth coming off it like touching a living body. Beneath him, Des Voeux’s all slumped onto his own locked elbows, his head hanging limp between his shoulders like a tired mule. Foolishness, any faith is. And what is love—his spirit gags on the word, for it opens in the throat like a grasping hand—but faith hoisted onto another? Doubly foolish.

He’s four fingers deep now, mostly just twisting and plunging roughly enough to make Des Voeux sorry he exists. Yet Des Voeux’s prick is doing its blessed best to take interest. That’s why he’d followed him into the tent in the first place, knocked him to the ground from behind: he was the only one sporting enough by nature to still take some pleasure in it, no matter how hard he went. He’d be either the whipping boy or the whip, Des Voeux would, and no in between. Then he spits in his hand again—he’d loosened him up plenty; he gapes into in the half-dark like a shocked mouth—and guides himself in.

“There you are,” Des Voeux says in a snotty tone.

“Talk again and I’ll slit your throat,” Hickey replies pleasantly. That shuts him up: there was a time it wouldn’t have, but these days one can’t be sure what Hickey will do. He begins moving into him—Des Voeux whines like a dog, dry as he is—and doesn’t stop until he’s fully sheathed. He reaches up and hooks his finger into Des Voeux’s mouth and pulls his head to one side, just to see how easily he complies. His cracked lips bleed, his gums bleed, an opened scar on his back, jostled open, bleeds. He drags his hand from his mouth up his back and licks the blood off his palm. It even tastes less like blood than it should—it’s thin, watered down. He thinks again of the nodding, fretful nuns, their fable of transubstantiation. He thinks of Billy’s translucent, grave beauty. He thinks of a life beyond this one: Billy on his back in white sands, shielding his eyes from the sun. That abashed, hard-won smile of his. Then for a moment he swears he can smell violet water, taste it. Like drawing a bow across a violin he draws his blade lightly across Des Voeux’s throat. Just enough to make him jump.

“Please,” he pleads. “Let me live.”

Hickey grins in the dark. His fingers twitch hungrily against the knife’s heavy handle and with his other hand he levers Des Voeux’s head back, exposing his throat to the half-dark, the buffeting of wind that never ends, the hunger.


End file.
